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E-scooter company Lime confirms it's 'going into electric cars'

E-scooter company Lime is trying to get into the very industry it’s working to limit — cars.

“[We’re not] here to build companies for a year or two. It’s about building a platform. Lime is going into electric cars and diversifying. Our long-term view is over many form factors and vehicle types,” Caen Contee, Lime co-founder and VP of marketing, said during a panel at the annual Web Summit tech event in Lisbon, Portugal.

Lime, which first launched as a bike-sharing startup in January 2017, has since become a leader in the electric scooter space. Less than two years old, the company currently has a $1.1 billion valuation, making it one of the fastest to reach unicorn status.

Funding to bike- and scooter-sharing startups has picked up substantially over the past two years, with 2018 seeing record levels of funding, according to research from CB Insights. Companies raised $3.7 billion across 44 equity rounds in 2018 so far.

“We are here to serve and in service we’re ultimately pro-regulation — we want to figure this out,” he said.

Though Lime operates bikes and scooters for now, electric car-sharing makes logical sense because the future is “multi-modal.”

“What’s going to win is a platform for innovation…creating trust, and the best service, enabling yourself to always innovate,” Contee said. “We’re creating that sense of urgency, that sense of ‘we’ in change.”